The New York Review of Books

1.

He would have loved it. Dead for a hundred years, but climbing the best-seller lists with a memoir whose publication he deferred for a century till everyone mentioned in it, along with anyone who remembered them, would be dead too and in no position to complain. Since he lived (1835–1910) as if a single lifetime could not contain him, it’s entirely apt that he’s back with a posthumous encore.

Berg Collection/New York Public Library

Mark Twain, Tuxedo, New York, 1907; photograph by Isabel Lyon from ‘Mark Twain: A Skeptic’s Progress,’ a recent exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum. The catalog is published by the New York Public Library.

Mark Twain is sometimes imagined as a shambling fellow with a slow drawl (there are no known recordings of his voice), but in fact, he was incessantly restless, edgy, tight-wired, rarely at rest. In one three-month period while living in Washington, he moved five times. He made dozens of ocean crossings and lecture tours, including one between the summers of 1895 and 1896 during which he “barked at audiences” up to twenty times a month across the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, and what was then Ceylon.

Even on those rare occasions when he was more or less sedentary, he kept up a prodigious pace, “working,” by his own account, “every night from eleven or twelve until broad day in the morning.” If his drive slackened on one book, as it did repeatedly while he was writing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), he would “pigeonhole” it, turn to another, then come back renewed by the deflected effort. He was never much for sleeping. According to his friend William Dean Howells, he would coax himself to bed with champagne, beer, or hot scotch—sometimes, no doubt, mixing them into a soporific cocktail. “I am going to settle down some day,” he wrote to a fellow contributor to the San Francisco Alta, the paper that gave him his start by printing his dispatches from Europe that became The Innocents Abroad (1869), “even if I have to do it in a cemetery.”

As it turned out, he never did settle down, exactly. Instead, he spent his last years planning on “speaking from the grave”—his phrase for the memoir that has now appeared upon the centenary of his death. With the excusable vanity of genius, he had high expectations for its reception. It will “live a couple of thousand years without any effort,” he told Howells, and will “then take a fresh start and live the rest of the time.”

In one way or another, he worked at it for much of his life. “The truth is,” he told a friend, “my books are simply autobiographies” in the sense that they are stocked with fictional versions of people he had known, including himself. But starting around age forty, he made some tentative attempts at a memoir of a more conventional kind. Already famous as the author not only of The Innocents Abroad but also Roughing It (1872) and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), he had reason to think there was money to be made from such a book. A big spender and a bad investor, he needed money all the time.

At first he did not advance very far with the project, allowing only a few bits into print as magazine pieces now and then. Others were published in sanitized form after his death—in 1924, by his first biographer Albert Bigelow Paine, later by Bernard DeVoto in a compilation entitled Mark Twain in Eruption (1940), and most recently—until now—in a book too authoritatively entitled The Autobiography of Mark Twain (1959) by its editor, Charles Neider, who presented the scattered materials “in the sequence which one would reasonably expect from autobiography.”

There is nothing reasonable about the new book. In some respects it is another compendium of fragments. Some have never been published before, while those that have been are presented here, for the first time, in the order of their composition rather than re- arranged in the order of reported events. Here we meet “Uncle Dan’l,” a middle-aged slave of “wide and warm” sympathies whom Twain knew as a child and on whom he modeled Jim in Huckleberry Finn, as well as a boy named Tom Blankenship, the model for Huck himself, “ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but…tranquilly and continuously happy.” We meet, too, the originals of lesser characters, such as Twain’s mother’s cousin, James Lampton, the model for Colonel Sellers (Twain’s version of Mr. Micawber) in The Gilded Age (1873), who lived his whole life “prospectively rich,” in limbo between the last disappointment and the next scheme.

Included in a recent exhibition of Twain manuscripts and memorabilia at the Morgan Library and Museum was an intriguing item: a board game, which he designed and patented at age fifty, called “Mark Twain’s Memory-Builder,” in which the players earn points by filling in a centuries-long calendar with the names of battles, kings, and the like.¹ The autobiography, too, appears to have been a kind of memory-builder—an exercise by which Twain kept up his powers of recollection against the dimming effects of time: “I can see the farm yet, with perfect clearness,” he writes about his uncle’s home, where he had spent happy times more than fifty years earlier, and the writing is so vivid that one smells the winter fires and sees “the slick and carpetless oak floor faintly mirroring the dancing flame-tongues and freckled with black indentations where fire-coals had popped out and died a leisurely death.”

Sometimes the autobiography seems Twain’s letter to posterity. At other times, reading it feels like eavesdropping on a conversation he is having with himself. As always, there were financial considerations. Approaching seventy, with mortality on his mind—”it is a bad business to get the habit of being sick. You will find it hard to break”—he got the idea of carving up his reminiscences and adding them “as notes (copyrightable) to my existing books,” and thus ensuring a protected income for his survivors.

2.

So what should we make of the result? Well, it’s just at the start of its two- thousand-year run, two thirds of the whole work aren’t yet in print (this is the first of three projected volumes), and the early reviews are mixed. “A disjointed and largely baffling bore” was Adam Gopnik’s verdict in The New Yorker. Garrison Keillor, in The New York Times Book Review, dismissed it as “a ragbag of scraps,” and Jonathan Yardley, of The Washington Post, found some passages engaging but felt “trapped in a locked room with a garrulous old coot.” On the other hand, in an editorial-page hurrah, The New York Times declared the book a gift from a time-traveler whose voice remains amazingly fresh: “We can hardly wait for Volume 2.”

I’m with the Gray Lady. By turns charming and cranky, the old coot is very good company—especially when he dredges up old grudges. He “did not forgive his dead enemies,” Howells said with affection; “their death seemed to deepen their crimes, like a base evasion, or a cowardly attempt to escape.” A reviewer who panned The Gilded Age is a “reptile.” A publisher who refused Twain’s terms is an “animal,” and, more particularly, a “skinny, yellow, toothless, bald-headed, rat-eyed” animal. A good deal of the autobiography is about settling old accounts.

But it is “not,” as Twain says, “a revenge-record.” What really inflames him are not the discourtesies committed by people, but the injuries delivered by time. There is a lot of death in this book—the witnessed or reported deaths of family and friends, and, throughout, his own prospective death. He is driven to white-hot anger by those who dishonored his friend Ulysses S. Grant, whose agonizing cancer of the tongue and jaw never revealed itself “in the expression of his face…as long as he was awake,” though his courage by day could not conceal his ordeal by night, since “when asleep his face would take advantage of him and make revelations.”

In 1906, as if it had happened yesterday, Twain writes about the death in 1858 of his brother Henry, to whom doctors administered an inadvertently fatal dose of morphine following a steamboat fire that had scalded his lungs. With excruciating intimacy, but without the slightest trace of what Huck calls “sentimentering,” he reports how word of the death of his favorite child, Susy, at age twenty-four, reached him while he was an ocean away. As the truth of the news defeats his incredulity, he finds himself hearing in his memory the sound of her child’s voice—the “funny musketry-clatter of little words, interrupted at intervals by the heavy-artillery crash” of big words that she didn’t quite get right, as when, at age five, she told a visitor that she had been to church only once—to see her little sister Clara crucified. (She meant christened.)

And then there are the harrowing pages that recount how his beloved wife Livy (“slender and beautiful and girlish…to the last day of her life”) faded away before his eyes, despite his having taken her here and there and everywhere in the hope that she would rally in some healthful clime, until she finally gave up in a gorgeous room flooded with sunshine in their rented Florentine villa—too weak to walk to the window “to see the sun sink down, drowned in his pink and purple and golden floods, and overwhelm Florence with tides of color that make all the sharp lines dim and faint and turn the solid city to a city of dreams.” The sentences wander, the paragraphs go on; but there is nothing languid in the long descriptions of the furnishings in the death-house: the “sumptuous canopy over the brass bedstead…made of…shouting lemon-colored satin,” the doors “hooded with long curtains that descend to the floor and are caught apart in the middle to permit the passage of people and light.”

In the midst of the inventory by which he fixes in his mind the scene of the calamity, his attention wanders to another “venerable fortress,” Windsor Castle, which he had visited years before, where he imagines Queen Victoria supervising the installation of a dumbwaiter for bringing meals up from the basement kitchen and a modern trolley system for carrying them to royal guests—hints of the stupendous transformation of the British-ruled world over which she had reigned for most of a century. “She saw the whole of the new creation, she saw everything that was made, and without her witness was not anything made that was made.” More than thirty years earlier, in Roughing It, Twain had written of Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon that “whenever he found his speech growing too modern…he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases” without which “his Bible would have been only a pamphlet.” He does a good deal of ladling into his own baggy book, but this reader, at least, would not have had him leave anything out.

3.

It will doubtless strike some readers as incoherent. And so it is—in just the way that Twain thought good writing should be. “To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way,” he wrote in an 1895 essay, “How to Tell a Story,” was the basis of his art. In the title of that little manifesto, he used the word “tell” instead of “write” because he was, first and last, a talker. A prodigious speechmaker, he rarely spoke from a prepared text, especially when preceded by other speakers, whose remarks he liked to use as provocation for his own. “I had all the advantages,” he recalls about one occasion when he followed Brander Matthews, Richard Watson Gilder, and other worthies to the podium, “for I came without a text, and these boys furnished plenty of texts for me.” Spontaneous speech, he knew, is liable to digression, repetition, contradiction, and—if the audience is lucky—to “stretchers” and malapropisms, which have their best effect when the speaker seems “innocently unaware” of what he is saying. He was, in other words, his own best straight man.